He waited in palpitating silence, and when the soft rustle of skirts sounded down the corridor his heart stopped beating entirely. Then Marcelina pressed her face against the screened bars and gazed wistfully into the darkened cell. She had grown taller since he last saw her and her dark eyes had taken on a look of infinite melancholy; the rare promise of her youth had flowered suddenly in his absence and she stood before him a woman. Often in his dreams he had thought of her, but always as the black-eyed girl, saucy and fugitive as a bird, who had bewitched him with her childish graces; now she peered in at him through the prison bars with the eyes of a woman who has suffered and found her soul. For a moment she gazed into the darkness, and then she drew back involuntarily. The Pecos she had known was a grown-up boy, grim and quick in speech but full of the reckless fire of youth; a dashing cowboy, guiding his horse by a touch of the hand and riding, riding, always. Here was a hard-faced man, pale and bowed by confinement, and his eyes were like a starved animal's. She started and bit her lip. "Are you Paycos?" she asked timidly. The bitterness of his fate swept over Pecos at the words—he looked down at his crumpled clothes, his outworn boots, and faded shirt and rumbled in his throat. "No, Marcelina," he said, "I'm only a caged wolf—a coyote that the vaqueros have roped and tied and fastened to a tree. I'm a hard-looker, all right—how'd you come to find me?" [Illustration: She laid a brown hand against the bars as if in protest and motioned him nearer the screen] She laid a brown hand against the bars as if in protest and motioned him nearer the screen. "I have only been in town four days," she said hurriedly. "All summer I was shut up at Verde, and Ol' Creet—ah, that bad, ba-ad man! My mother took me to school the day he come to Geronimo. I am 'fraid, Paycos—but this morning I run away to see you. The seesters will be hunt for me now. Look Paycos"—she thrust her hand into the bosom of her dress and drew forth a small bundle, wrapped in a blue silk handkerchief—"_Cuidado_, be careful," she whispered; "when I keess you good-bye at the door I weel put thees een your hand—_ssst!_" She turned and looked up the corridor where the deputy was doing the Sherlock. He was a new man—the jail deputy—just helping out during the session of the court and correspondingly impressed with his own importance. Nothing larger than a darning-needle could be passed through the heavy iron screen, but all the same he kept his eye on them, and when he saw the quick thrust of her hand all the suspicions of the amateur sleuth rushed over him at once.